Digg it, Stumble Upon it........

Are any of you users of Digg, Stumble Upon, Slashdot and such other Web 2.0 content aggregation services? Do you write a blog and feel that readers should have more options in book marking and sharing your content across these Websites ? If you are interested in driving up traffic for your site (who isn't?) bear in mind the fact that these news aggregator sites can provide a very wide exposure to your content

In case the answer is yes, to both or to either of the questions I would recommend the use of bookmark buttons, the kind which you see near the title of this post. Get it from here. You just need to open an account, choose your blogging platform and choose the type of button you want. In Blogger the process is just point and click: the button is installed as a page element. But this looks ugly and is surely going to be missed by readers who has an attention span of not more than 3 seconds. Where you preferably want is near the post headline, or in some other cases near the bottom where it is easily visible and the viewer needs a minimum amount of cursor movement to access it.

For that to happen, as I have done it here you need to dive a bit into the template code. In Blogger go to Layout > Edit HTML and select the Expand Widget Templates checkbox. Copy paste the HTML code in Word or Notepad (Notepad++, even better) and search for

div class='post-footer'

tag (replace header with footer if you want the button at the beginning of your post, which is what I have done). Save the template and you are good to go, your content accessible to billions of viewers.

Full redesign

For a long time this blog looked like a step son who was passed over by the evil step mother when the contents of her will was disclosed. Just look at the number of months between this and the last post; also look over at the archives. Notice a trend? Well, I was more enthusiastic in the earlier years (comparatively,of course. No way did I average 10 posts per month even in my best days).

Be as it were, there are quite a number of reasons for my lackluster performance. I was a bit jaded after my final semester exams last March, and what with the job hunting and all there was hardly any time or inclination to blog. Even after I got my job (and a pretty decent Net connection) there was hardly any enthusiasm, and I blogged in fits and starts. Now that I come to think of it I was simply bored by my blog design. Inspite of my articles In Digit where I repeatedly used to write how fast and easy it was to give a new look to your blog I was too lazy to do that myself.. Period. The templates in Blogger were my sticking point and I even created a Wordpress blog (it's still there) The content was exported from this blog) because Wordpress offered plenty of plug ins and beautiful templates.

However I was not ready to dump Blogger just yet. I was also not ready to give up on blogging- a big thanks to Partha, Satya, Bhupi and others who opined that I should keep blogging. But no way was I gonna write in a blog that had the default stretched denim as template. Time to move on with a complete redesign.

First was the search for a new template. I did a Google search on blogger templates and was overwhelmed with a problem of plenty. So many designs, so many choices! Sometimes I didn't like the colour, sometimes the font was the villain. I was looking for a design which would provoke a gut reaction and make me say ," This is what I want my blog to look like". After reviewing about a thousand (more or less) templates I saw this one and the reaction was "This is the ONE". Downloaded the XML file, uploaded it and I was brand new, shiny and with a crystal look. So far ,so good.

I wanted my blog to look professional which entailed adding the orange RSS icon (You can subscribe to posts using a default link, but its buried at the bottom and is simply crap). I headed over to Feedburner and created a feed. This is a point and click process and you needn't do any complex Javascript gymnastics to get this button. For a good measure I also added the option to deliver posts to email. Just click on the link on the top right corner, enter your email ID and every time the content is updated your readers get it delivered to their inbox. Sweet!

Adding search functionality is very important for any content rich website. Notice the Google search box on the top right? This can be added either the easy way by using it as page element or the hard way by copy pasting code snippet. However this feature is not available in the standard Blogger but in the Blogger in Draft. For those not in the know, this is actually Blogger's experimental service where features that are planned to be pushed out in the future are present. For all intents and purposes it is exactly the same as the parent service. The only difference that I noted is that the number and type of page elements closely resemble Google Gadgets. I selected what I wanted, viz. the search box and saved my changes.

The trickiest element in my redesign was the tag cloud. I didn't like the way Blogger's default label element displayed my tags. The tag cloud seemed prettier and more intuitive with tags that occur more frequently displayed in larger font sizes. While there are some services like ZoomClouds and TagCloud that will create a tag cloud for you just like Feedburner creates feeds I preferred to get my hands dirty with code. This was because I would have full control over the way my tags behaved and there would not be an empty space smack in the middle of my blog if the service goes offline for some reason (most of the services that I tried were down). Another reason was that if I went by the manual route I will have full control on colours, fonts, size etc of the tag cloud. After some research (actually I spent about an hour) I came upon this page which seemed to get the job done. I followed the instructions and after a fair bit of playing around with colours and font sizes got my tag cloud working. Mission accomplished.

For the moment the redesign is over. I might add some more links and other bits and pieces but the basic look and feel is locked down. I would like to ask my readers what widgets and page elements you think are invaluable for your blog. Fire away in the comments below.